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ODESSA — Mexico and the U.S. may frequently spar, but the two nations are bound by energy — networks of pipelines that stretch from Texas to its southern neighbor to deliver the lion’s share of Mexico’s natural gas.
This longstanding economic relationship is at risk as the Trump administration backs out of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a free-trade pact President Donald Trump spearheaded and that was enacted in 2018 as a replacement for NAFTA to bolster trade between the three countries.
Trump administration officials said they would instead negotiate amendments annually for a decade until the agreement expires in 2036.
Further complicating the issue is the U.S. war on Iran, as ceasefire talks collapse — which is all but likely to throw global energy markets into further disarray.
For at least two decades, Mexico has sought U.S. gas to support its electricity demand across the residential, industrial and power sectors, and its dependence has skyrocketed. In 2005, Mexico received 750 million cubic feet of natural gas a day from the U.S., said Ira Joseph, a fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Global Energy Policy. Last year, that number jumped to 7.5 billion cubic feet a day, according to the Energy Information Administration.
At least 90% of that natural gas comes from Texas, which has become one of the bigger beneficiaries of the economic arrangement.
“Today Mexico faces a high dependence on natural gas from abroad,” Energy Secretary Luz Elena González Escobar said at an April press conference. “We are importing 75% of the natural gas we consume in the country.”
Mexico has taken steps to shore up its own natural gas reservoirs, announcing in April that it would seek to ramp up fracking, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo’s administration said. The effort is meant to lessen its dependence on U.S. producers.
Experts are skeptical of this plan, arguing it would take years and a dramatic increase in oil and gas production to make up for the billions of cubic feet of natural gas the country imports a day to meet its growing demand. As nations move to insulate themselves from global energy shocks by decreasing their reliance on others, experts said Mexico is embarking on an opposite path.
“The Texas energy industry is strategic for not only (Mexico’s) power generation, but also industrial competitiveness,” said Adrian Duhalt, a fellow at Southern Methodist University’s Texas Mexico Center, which researches the relationship between the two. “We cannot imagine … the importance of the natural gas from Texas for Mexico’s power generation and manufacturing activities.”
The country has historically struggled to drum up its own supply. In 2013, former president Enrique Peña Nieto introduced a constitutional reform that broke a 75-year monopoly by Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, a government-run oil company charged with most of oil and gas production. The reform introduced bidding rounds for oil and gas exploration and production, including the development of hydraulic fracturing, Duhalt said.
But there wasn’t enough immediate building — or production — to transform Mexico into a standalone producer of natural gas, despite a surplus of crude oil. In 2018, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador rose to the presidency and halted new contracts, dramatically setting the reform’s goals back. And Pemex alone is unlikely to have the needed resources and infrastructure to deploy large-scale projects, Duhalt said.
And Mexico predominantly focused on crude oil production, Duhalt said, which also contributed to the sustained shortage of natural gas.
“Historically, Pemex contributions to the government represented a large percentage of government revenues,” Duhalt said. “So to maximize that rate in the short term, the government prioritized crude oil production, and natural gas was left on the back burner.”
The end result has been a tight-knit relationship that could put Mexico’s energy security at risk, experts said, as geopolitical conflicts deepen and trade agreements unravel.
The Permian Basin, a vast oil field in western Texas, is the nation’s largest producer of oil and gas. It contributes at least half of U.S. oil. An excess of natural gas resides in these oil deposits, too, that producers have grappled with disposing of for years.
Roughly 90% of Mexico’s natural gas is the product of Texas, said Aparajita Datta, an energy policy associate at the University of Houston, a transaction bolstered by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which Trump has said he wouldn’t renew. Rejecting the agreement — which keeps natural gas prices low for buyers — could be imperiled by the time the agreement expires in 2036.
And it could add new pressure for Mexico, which will pay higher prices, and Texas, which is overstocked with natural gas reserves.
Still, Datta added, the U.S. can store its excess reserves for 100 days, giving it more time and leeway to navigate market disruptions. Mexico, on the other hand, can only save any natural gas for three days.
“From the Mexican perspective, I benefit from piped natural gas from Texas, because I get rates that are cheaper than shipped liquefied natural gas and make sure that I have energy security for, let’s say, a war,” Datta said. “I am constantly dependent on my neighbor, where … there’s been policy uncertainties, all of this geopolitical movement that’s happening that essentially then puts my energy security at risk.”
The longstanding bond in energy between the two countries is particularly vulnerable as political tensions rise between them, Joseph, the Columbia fellow, said.
“It could become part of the geopolitical football,” Joseph said. “Obviously, the border relationship between the U.S. and Mexico, whether you’re talking about immigration or the most recent form of the trade agreement. This could potentially disrupt this big form of trade between the U.S. and Mexico.”
